According to Wikipedia, published Aug. 1, 2011 on the world wide web, “Multithreading Computers” have hardware support to efficiently execute multiple threads. These are distinguished from multiprocessing systems (such as multi-core systems) in that the threads have to share the resources of a single core: the computing units, the CPU caches and the translation lookaside buffer (TLB). Where multiprocessing systems include multiple complete processing units, multithreading aims to increase utilization of a single core by using thread-level as well as instruction-level parallelism. As the two techniques are complementary, they are sometimes combined in systems with multiple multithreading CPUs and in CPUs with multiple multithreading cores.
The Multithreading paradigm has become more popular as efforts to further exploit instruction level parallelism have stalled since the late-1990s. This allowed the concept of Throughput Computing to re-emerge to prominence from the more specialized field of transaction processing:
Even though it is very difficult to further speed up a single thread or single program, most computer systems are actually multi-tasking among multiple threads or programs.
Techniques that would allow speed up of the overall system throughput of all tasks would be a meaningful performance gain.
The two major techniques for throughput computing are multiprocessing and multithreading.
Some advantages include:
If a thread gets a lot of cache misses, the other thread(s) can continue, taking advantage of the unused computing resources, which thus can lead to faster overall execution, as these resources would have been idle if only a single thread was executed.
If a thread cannot use all the computing resources of the CPU (because instructions depend on each other's result), running another thread permits to not leave these idle.
If several threads work on the same set of data, they can actually share their cache, leading to better cache usage or synchronization on its values.
Some criticisms of multithreading include:
Multiple threads can interfere with each other when sharing hardware resources such as caches or translation lookaside buffers (TLBs).
Execution times of a single thread are not improved but can be degraded, even when only one thread is executing. This is due to slower frequencies and/or additional pipeline stages that are necessary to accommodate thread-switching hardware.
Hardware support for multithreading is more visible to software, thus requiring more changes to both application programs and operating systems than Multiprocessing.
Types of multithreading:
Block Multi-Threading Concept
The simplest type of multi-threading occurs when one thread runs until it is blocked by an event that normally would create a long latency stall. Such a stall might be a cache-miss that has to access off-chip memory, which might take hundreds of CPU cycles for the data to return. Instead of waiting for the stall to resolve, a threaded processor would switch execution to another thread that was ready to run. Only when the data for the previous thread had arrived, would the previous thread be placed back on the list of ready-to-run threads.
For example:
1. Cycle i: instruction j from thread A is issued
2. Cycle i+1: instruction j+1 from thread A is issued
3. Cycle i+2: instruction j+2 from thread A is issued, load instruction which misses in all caches
4. Cycle i+3: thread scheduler invoked, switches to thread B
5. Cycle i+4: instruction k from thread B is issued
6. Cycle i+5: instruction k+1 from thread B is issued
Conceptually, it is similar to cooperative multi-tasking used in real-time operating systems in which tasks voluntarily give up execution time when they need to wait upon some type of the event.
This type of multi threading is known as Block or Cooperative or Coarse-grained multithreading.
Hardware Cost
The goal of multi-threading hardware support is to allow quick switching between a blocked thread and another thread ready to run. To achieve this goal, the hardware cost is to replicate the program visible registers as well as some processor control registers (such as the program counter). Switching from one thread to another thread means the hardware switches from using one register set to another.
Such additional hardware has these benefits:
The thread switch can be done in one CPU cycle.
It appears to each thread that it is executing alone and not sharing any hardware resources with any other threads. This minimizes the amount of software changes needed within the application as well as the operating system to support multithreading.
In order to switch efficiently between active threads, each active thread needs to have its own register set. For example, to quickly switch between two threads, the register hardware needs to be instantiated twice.